Newspaper Article

HOW HOLLYWOOD BEATS UP WRITERS ; Or, how I found out what I already should have known about the movie business

Nova, Craig

2004

Overview

I must say, right from the beginning, that I should have known better, since I grew up in Hollywood, attended Hollywood High, and in the miserable childhood that seems to be crucial to the formation of the novelist's sensibility, I left home at 17 and moved in with the family of a friend. The friend's father was a screenwriter, and the business had broken this writer's heart. When I left California for New York to become a novelist, this screenwriter took me aside and said, with tears in his eyes, \"Whatever you do, don't come back here.\" The studio executive had already paid for one previous version of this script. It was standard Hollywood stuff. I guessed they wanted something fresh from me. Maybe the way Ford Madox Ford would have enlarged on the fragment of a story they had given me. The insulting aspect of this is how the studio shows you that you don't measure up. In the beginning, they have a vague idea that you might produce, but they aren't sure how. \"Talent\", like a beautiful woman, they seem to say, is a mystery. Who knows what she is going to do? Maybe after you fly her to Italy for the weekend, she spurns your advances. The ingrate. What a pain these writers are, the studio seems to say. Why won't they just do the job, you know, a script not that different from those that have already made money? Don't they get it?

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC